what is the difference between web deployment tool 2.1 and web deploy 3.5? which one is required for deploys from VS 2010?

Question

I am trying to setup publishing/deployment of an asp.net mvc project from visual studio to a box running IIS 7.5/Windows Server 2008. I found this useful tutorial and know I need to install something called web deploy.

When I go to install this from Web Platform Installer I see a few options: web deployment tool 2.1, web deploy 3.5 and web deploy 3.5 for hosting servers.

Which one do I need? What is the difference?

Answer 1

One might want to know why there's two different names for one single product.

While struggling getting this thing working I used many websites to solve the issues I encountered. Reading the team blog, ScottGu's blog, Technet sites, downloading from the Microsoft download centre and as you, using the Web Platform installer I encountered references to the same product using different names.

As far as I can summarize there's this list of versions:

• Web Deployment Tool 1.0, released 2009-09
• Web Deployment Tool 1.1, released 2010-01
• Web Deployment Tool 2.0, released 2011-04
• Web Deployment Tool 2.1, released 2011-04
• Web Deploy 3.0, released 2012-07
• Web Deploy 3.5, released 2013-07
• Web Deploy 3.6, released 2015-07

Although the official product name has been 'Web Deployment Tool', references to it are written as 'Web Deploy' (as in: Below are the steps for how to install Web Deploy on a production server...) It's rather confusing...

Sources:

• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/13/automating-deployment-with-microsoft-web-deploy.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd569059(v=ws.10).aspx
• http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2011/04/05/announcing-web-deploy-2-0-refresh.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericparvin/archive/2015/06/19/web-deploy-3-6-fixing-the-proxy-server-issue.aspx

Answer 2

Web Deploy is just a tool to help automate deploying your ASP.NET web site to many different web server configurations. It does not matter what version of VS you have. The latest version is 3.5 and it just several added features compared to 2.1

Here is a link to the download which will give you lots more information than Web Platform Installer http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39277

Here is the blog from the MS IIS team that talks about the various versions and features http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/default.aspx